A former employee of a well known real estate company claims the company president was obsessed with employees’ weight and he faced discrimination on the job because he was overweight. Plaintiff alleges that his supervisor made comments that he was “too fat” and his weight had “ballooned” since he began working for the company.
Two New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) employees recently filed a troubling sex discrimination lawsuit. According to a recent article in the New York Daily News, the two female employees, Lillian Padilla and Magda Rodriguez, claimed they are subjected to entirely different conditions than their male counterparts. The allegations state that the women are consistently given the hardest and dirtiest jobs, are victimized by a barrage of threats and insults, and are denied showers or changing rooms after spending hours working in sewage. The complaint further alleges that the women, both of whom are lesbians, are subjected to derogatory slurs attacking their sexual orientation, and have also been unwillingly exposed to pornographic materials.
According to the complaint, this is not the first instance of sex discrimination committed by the DEP. The women claim that other female employees have left the company because of similar treatment, causing a shocking disparity in the male to female ratio at the DEP, with only five female laborers out of the 426 currently employed. Furthermore, when attempting to assert their rights, the female employees were threatened by management and continued to receive harsh treatment. However, despite these acts, all Padilla and Rodriguez are seeking is the same treatment as their male co-workers. Says Rodriguez, “I just want the policies changed so that women have equal rights. I have no shower. She has no shower. We work in sewage. That’s what we do all day.” The DEP is said to be currently investigating the claim.
On December 3, 2008, a jury awarded Juan I. Valera $420,000 for being subjected to a hostile work environment. Valera, an employee of Costco for 20 years, is gay and is also HIV-positive. Valera’s attorney alleged that a Costco General Manager casually used the word “queer” around Valera, which caused him to take a leave of absence. To rectify the situation, Valera asked the Assistant General Manager to protect him from insensitive remarks. The following day, Valera was demoted and received a pay cut.
A report on MSNBC.com noted that, in February 2009, Valera is suing Costco again. Valera alleges in his new Los Angeles Superior Court complaint that the company’s failure to reinstate him to his old position is an act of retaliation that stems from both the previous jury award and his sexual orientation.
This week, the San Francisco Chronicle and Law.com reported that Maya Perez, a transgender woman, filed a sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, Burlington Coat Factory, claiming that while she was a sales associate in their San Francisco store, she had to endure seven years of physical and verbal abuse from her supervisors, colleagues and customers after undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. Perez is one of a handful of transgender people who are litigating such employment discrimination matters.
Perez began working at the San Francisco store in 1996. Perez alleges that after she transitioned from a man to a woman in 2001, fellow co-workers and customers harassed her by pushing and groping her, showing her pornographic magazines and photographs, and calling her names such as “he-she.” The managers and security guards failed to intervene and protect her after they heard and saw the incidents either in person or on the store’s security cameras. The store also prevented her from changing her name tag from “Stevie,” her male name, to “Maya,” her current name. After legally changing her name from “Steven Perez” to “Maya Perez” in 2003, the store forced her to reapply for her position with her new name, even though she had already worked in the store for seven years.
Burlington Coat Factory’s company policy prohibits discrimination based on sex, but it does not make reference to sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes. After Perez complained to her supervisors and the regional human resource director about the harassment, neither took any steps to investigate the issue, as required by company policy. Perez is seeking punitive damages, emotional distress, back pay and a change in employment policies to ensure that managers and employees are more sensitive toward gender identity matters.
The New York City Human Rights law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. This ban includes perceived sexual orientation as well, meaning that an employer may not discriminate against an employee that it simply senses is homosexual. Recently, the Court of Appeals in the United Kingdom found that a man forced to leave his job because of merciless taunting by his colleagues who took him to be a gay, won the right to claim compensation from his employers. In this case, a married man with children alleged that he was tormented by his coworkers because he had attended an all-boys boarding school. His coworkers knew that he was not gay, but taunted him nevertheless because of homophobia and associated stereotypes. In finding that the victim’s claims came within the United Kindom’s regulations, the Court held that the legislature in prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace could not possibly have intended that a victim be required to declare his sexual orientation in order to establish that harassment was based on sexual orientation.
The New York Law Journal recently reported that a prominent New York law firm has filed a countersuit against a former Partner. The firm accuses the former Partner, who had originally filed a defamation suit against the firm, of “extremely inappropriate personal conduct,” claiming he had a “pattern of [making] suggestive comments, sexual innuendo, sexual propositions, sexually-oriented teasing, gender-specific jokes and obscene gestures” to other employees.
A New York State Judge in Brooklyn has re-confirmed the broad goals of the New York City Human Rights Law. In Bumpus v. New York City Transit Authority, 18 Misc.3d 1131(A) (N.Y. Feb. 13, 2008), the plaintiff was a transgender woman who had been born anatomically male but lived her life with a female identity. She complained that she had been discriminated against by a New York Transit Authority employee who had harassed her and made “transgender-phobic epithets” to her for a period of approximately 10 minutes.
The court denied the New York Transit Authority’s motion to dismiss the case, reaffirming that “[t]he Human Rights Law affords protection to transgender people in New York City.” The Court noted that “[t]he New York City Human Rights Law was intended to be more protective than the state and Federal counterparts,” and that “[t]he legislative history contemplates that the law be independently construed with the aim of making it the most progressive in the nation.”
In its decision regarding the New York City Human Rights Law, the court relied on the case of Selmanovic v. NYSE Group, a case in which Schwartz & Perry LLP is participating. We remain committed to fighting to ensure that the New York City Human Rights Law remains one of the most stringent and protective human rights laws in the country.
